Thursday, April 5, 2018

Peak Horse

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In the early 1900s, automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors
were becoming very trendy.The human population
was two billion and growing, while the horse population peaked and declined.Model T Fords did not require five acres of
good grassland to fuel them, an area that could feed six to eight people.While grassland was, in theory, a renewable
resource, there was not an infinite supply of it.Pasture could be degraded or destroyed by
overgrazing, drought, plowing, or urban sprawl.

Of course, motor vehicles are dependent on a wide variety
finite nonrenewable resources.The
global production of conventional oil peaked around 2005, and now we’re briskly
advancing toward the peak of unconventional sources — tar sands, shale
deposits, and deep-water — the fossil energy that’s far more difficult and expensive
to extract.When we pass Peak Oil,
production will begin a continuous decline, and prices will rise.Some estimate that this will begin around
2030.

Life is solar powered.Plants have solar panels that use light to create carbohydrates.Plant eating animals acquire these nutrients
by feasting on the greenery.Meat eating
animals consume the flesh of plant eaters.Legions of wee organisms extract the nutrients from biomass and build
topsoil.Solar energy is also embedded
in coal, oil, and natural gas — carbon that was sequestered millions of years
ago.

Throughout the three million year era of our ancestors,
muscle power was the primary energy for moving people and things.Muscle power is highly versatile, able to run
on a variety of edible fuels — meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, roots, insects.More versatile than horses, human muscles can
move people and stuff through dense rainforests, up rugged mountains, and
across deserts.Horses are poorly
adapted for hot climates and arctic regions.

Pita
Kelekna noted that humans have a long history of acquiring stored solar
energy via the consumption of horse flesh.At the Roche de Solutré site, near Mâcon, France, archaeologists found a
2.5 acre (1 ha) bone bed, up to 29 feet (9 m) thick, containing the bones of up
to 100,000 horses.Neanderthals hunted horses
there 50,000 years ago.Later, humans
hunted them from 37,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Around 9,000 years ago, the last horse in the Americas died
in Patagonia.The once plentiful wild
horses of Western and Central Europe’s river valleys were apparently eliminated
by overhunting 8,000 years ago.To the
east, large numbers of horses managed to survive on the wide open Eurasian steppes,
where trapping animals was less easy.

Horses were domesticated about 6,000 years ago.Kelekna described how nomadic pastoralists
became skillful horse parasites.“The
Mongols lived off the horse; as they traveled, they milked and slaughtered for
food.They consumed a steady diet of
milk and yoghurt, drank the horse’s blood, and mixed dried milk paste with
water, dried meat, and millet.”

Eventually, clever folks realized that horses were not just a
tasty form of solar energy — they also had more muscle power than humans.If properly enslaved, they could be used to
pull stuff, haul stuff, and carry riders.Four legged slaves enabled a tremendous expansion of soil mining, forest
mining, mineral mining, bloody empire building, and economic growth.They unlocked the gateway to industrial
civilization.

Around 25,000 years ago, the mammoth hunters at the Dolní Věstonice site in the
Czech Republic heated their mammoth bone huts by burning the solar energy
embedded in two fuels: mammoth bones and black coal.By the mid-1500s, English forest miners had
nearly succeeded in eliminating the ancient rainforest.This created an energy shortage that inspired
a large scale transition to coal burning.In the late 1800s, the oil industry emerged, and the war on the future
became turbocharged.

As the age of mechanical horsepower accelerated, the long era
of four legged horse power rode off into the sunset.My grandparents witnessed the advent of Peak
Horse, and my parents saw work horses largely disappear from farms and
cities.Physicist Albert
Bartlett calculated that children born after 1966 will see the world
consume most of its oil during their lifetime.Industrial civilization has an expiration date. So, we’ll just have to go back to horse power,
right? Well, umm, there are some
challenges.

Eric
Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse
era.By 1898, big city streets were
jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of
manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies
and overpowering stench.Cities were
rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial
jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums.

Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure
daily — 3 to 4 million pounds in New York City every day.In 1800, farmers would pay haulers to bring
manure to their fields.By 1900, there
was way too much poop, and it piled up on empty lots.Some heaps were 60 feet high (18 m).Clouds of flies picked up pathogenic microbes
and brought them to your kitchen, spreading typhoid and other fecal-oral
diseases.In 1880, 41 horses died each
day on the streets of New York.The
average horse weighed 1,300 pounds (590 kg).Carcasses were often left to rot, making it easier to dismember them, so
they could be hauled away.

Horses were jammed into filthy, poorly ventilated stables —
excellent disease incubators.In 1872,
the Great Epizootic Epidemic struck, as huge numbers of horses were infected by
the equine influenza virus.Coughing
spread it from one animal to the next.Typically, they recovered in two to three weeks, but severe cases could
immobilize an animal for six months.

During the epidemic, available horse power was drastically
reduced.Folks had to use wheelbarrows
and handcarts to transport goods.The
postal service was hobbled.Freight
piled up.Coal deliveries stopped.Food distribution wheezed.On farms, plows and other equipment fell
idle.Boats quit moving on the Erie
Canal.Horse-drawn fire engines and
street cars did not move.When a big
fire roared in downtown Boston, firemen had to pull their heavy equipment from
the station by hand.

Almost certainly, there are people alive today who will see
the peak of motor vehicle production, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or
many) will experience the extinction of motor vehicles, and the lights going
out on civilization as we know it.Bye-bye railroads, air travel, refrigerators, elevators, irrigation,
mining, supermarkets, and so on.Sewage
treatment plants, municipal water systems, and digital technology will blink
out.Vast areas of cropland will cease
being plowed, planted, and harvested.The
age of obesity and cell phone addiction will end, but we might see the
screw-brained revival of wood-fueled motor vehicles.

Kelekna, Pita, The Horse in Human History, Cambridge
University Press, New York, 2009.

4 comments:

Very good article. The human race seems determined to kill itself and the other species who were doomed to " share" this planet with us. Once again I am reaffirmed in my well- thought out decision to not bring(breed)any other living being into this world. I left that to others, who mindlessly do so, leaving other people with consciences to try and actually live simpler and with more compassion towards all,not just their " families".

After spending 25+ years studying environmental history, ecological sustainability, and current trends, I expect that humans are racing into a turbulent future. What kind of life will a child born today have?